Background

Jacque Fresco was born on March 13, 1916, in New York City, New York, United States to the family of Sephardi Jewish descent. His father Isaac Fresco was a horticulturalist, and his mother, the former Lena Friedlich, was a homemaker. His parents wanted him to be a sign painter, like his uncle, but he was devoted to studying mathematics, conducting science experiments in the family bathroom and building advanced models of ships and aircraft. At 13, he designed a fan with rubber or fabric blades after a relative was hurt when he stuck his hand into a metal fan.

Education

Fresco did not like attending school and was often a truant. By his early teens, he was on his own. He dropped out of school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn during the Great Depression and attended meetings at the Young Communist League, which he was physically removed from after he vocally dejected the teachings of Karl Marx. At some point, he said, he went to Florida, where he caught poisonous snakes in the Everglades and sold them to circuses. He never attended college and occasionally fretted in later years that his lack of academic credentials might have limited his impact.

Career

During the late 1930s, Fresco worked as a designer at Douglas Aircraft Company in California. However, many of his designs had been considered to be impractical at the time, so he had to resign due to design disagreements. In 1942, he served in the Army as a technical designer, and could produce up to 40 designs a day, and helped improve safety systems for military aircraft. But because he could not adjust adequately to military life, he was eventually discharged.

At the age of 32, he teamed up with both Harry Giaretto and Eli Catran and created the Trend Home, mostly built of aluminum and glass. This model gained access to Hollywood and was displayed on the 8th stage of Warner Bros for three months attracting a lot of attention. This was one of Fresco’s career successes. In the early 1950s, he created and directed the Scientific Research Laboratories in Los Angeles, and worked as a freelance inventor, a lecturer, and a scientific consultant. Fresco also worked as a creator and a designer of science fiction models and special effects, as in the show Ring Around the Moon. He showed great skills and became a cinematic technical adviser and worked on Lou Stoumen’s documentary ‘The Naked Eye’ in 1956. His works Fresco’s most notable work is the Venus Project, a series of ten buildings located in Florida. It is a research center for Fresco and his partner Roxanne Meadows, and an educational center. They try to research and install a new resource-based economic system.

Fresco also authored and co-authored many books, such as ‘Looking Forward,’ co-authored with Kenneth Keyes Junior in 1969. This book pictures the ideal cybernetic society in which only individual gratification counts and no work exist anymore. In 1977, he published the ‘Introduction to Sociocyberneering’ book. Two years later, he wrote another book, ‘Structural Systems and Systems of Structure,’ and the ‘Venus Project: The Redesign of a Culture’ in 1995 where he explained his ideas and views about the Venus Project. In 2002, Fresco published one of his most brilliant works: ‘The Best That Money Can’t Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty, and War,’ and in 2007, he published his most recent work ‘Designing the Future.’ In 2006, ‘Future by Design,’ a semi-biographical film about Jack Fresco had been produced by William Gazecki, and Fresco had been featured again in the film ‘Zeitgeist Addendum’ by Peter Joseph in 2008, where his alternative ideas about the future had been clearly explained.

Fresco had been invited as a guest lecturer by so many institutions and higher education, such as Princeton University, Queens College, University of Southern Florida, Institute of Technology of Vienna, Columbia University, and others.

Achievements

• Jacque Fresco managed to achieve a wide acknowledgment as a futurist and creative thinker. He was recognized with a Novus Summit award at a NOVUS Summit, a special event of the 2016 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) for contributing to 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Looking Forward

    (You will see this society through the eyes of Scott and H...)

    1969
  • The Best That Money Can't Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty and War

    (Most problems we face in the world today are of our own m...)

    2002
  • The Venus Project: The Redesign of a Culture 1995
  • Designing the Future 2007

Religion

Fresco was a non-believer and adamant atheist thinking that all the world's problems could be solved by reason and using the scientific method.

Politics

Fresco acquired in south-central Florida in 1980 to pursue his quixotic plan: creating a resource-based economy that would rescue modern society from the ills of failed political systems. He wanted all sovereign nations to declare the world’s resources - clean air and water, arable land, education, health care, energy, and food - the "common heritage" of all people. In his so-called resource-based economy, he said, people would get what they want through computers. He looked upon his plan as a practical, even inevitable response to the inequities rampant in the modern world. But he conceded that only a catastrophe would lead to the adoption of his concept.

Views

Jacque Fresco predicted in 1956 that there would be "saucerlike" space stations, elevators that moved horizontally as well as vertically and, presciently, driverless cars. Cars, he said, would have "proximity control" that would render collisions "impossible."

Fresco had been thinking of a planned city, like the one laid out in Project Venus, since at least the 1950s. His work on it intensified after he moved to Florida, where he sketched out "Project Americana," a scheme in which "sensitive machines" would react to the environment to cool and clean the city, direct traffic, and close floodgates, he told Florida Living magazine in 1961.

Fresco, who believed fervently in science’s power to transform life for the better, said on Facebook: "We have the technology to build a global paradise on earth, and at the same time we have the power to end life as we know it. I am a futurist. I cannot predict the actual future - only what it can be if we manage the earth and its resources intelligently."

Fresco envisioned an alternative society where money would be eliminated and resources distributed equitably by computers.

Quotations: "Earth is abundant with plentiful resources. Our practice of rationing resources through monetary control is no longer relevant and is counter-productive to our survival."

"If we really wish to put an end to our ongoing international and social problems we must eventually declare Earth and all of its resources as the common heritage of all the world's people."

"Today we have access to highly advanced technologies. But our social and economic system has not kept up with our technological capabilities that could easily create a world of abundance, free of servitude and debt."

"Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality."

Personality

Fresco was described as an idealist, a dreamer, a utopist.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein

Connections

Fresco had two marriages, and divorced his second wife, Patricia, in 1957 after having two children from her: Richard, who was born in 1953 and died in 1976, and Bambi, who was born in 1956 and died in 2010 of cancer.

Father:

Isaac Fresco

Mother:

Lena Friedlich

ex-wife:

Patricia Fresco

Son:

Richard Fresco

Daughter:

Bambi Fresco

Partner:

Roxanne Meadows

Friend:

Eli Catran

References

• Naming the Venus Project: The Way I Remember It
  2016
• Bon Voyage Jacque Fresco
  2018
• The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought
  2014